UNION ARENA TCG Review – Does the Latest Anime Card Game Have Legs?
If you had told sixteen-year-old me I would one day be opening a pack of Bleach trading cards, I would’ve either thought you were joking or be really excited. Today, I got to live that reality thanks to UNION ARENA – a new TCG from Bandai.
What is UNION ARENA?
UNION ARENA is a collectible trading card game based on popular anime like Bleach, One Punch Man, and Demo Slayer. Unlike other TCGs based on anime, however, like One Piece, UNION ARENA lets players and collectors focus on sets from their favorite show. You can buy Bleach Booster boxes and starter decks, for example, and build your deck around that anime without even needing to dip your toes into every set and expansion.
This is pretty cool as it lets you pick and choose from the various sets that come out without necessarily having to buy products featuring anime you are less enthused about.
Right now, the two sets you can buy are BLEACH – Thousand Year Blood War and Hunter X Hunter.
Playing the game
I chose the BLEACH starter deck during our trial run. I wasn’t disappointed. Most of my favorite characters were present in the deck. The decks run pretty cheap too, although you don’t get a lot of fancy stuff in them. They’re relatively bare bones with a fifty card deck, rules, and a basic playmat.
Still, the game was fairly easy to pick up and (with some help from my friends), I was able to play it decently well after just one try.
The game feels like it has a lot of potential on initial play through. It’s highly combat focused and you spend much of the game slapping each other’s characters around. And yet, that’s oddly satisfying given they’re your favorite characters doing the battling.
Also, though this doesn’t have to do with the battle system, the cards themselves are a bit thicker than other more popular card games, giving the feel of handling them a different touch.
What it felt like to open Bleach – Thousand Year Blood War booster packs
I’ve been nearly a life-long fan of BLEACH, reading the manga in volumes as a teenager ahead of the anime. While it’s been exciting to get back into the anime with the new Blood War story being told, it felt absolutely wild to open BLEACH themed booster packs – decades after the show first came out.
Luckily, I was able to pull some of my favorite characters from my packs, and many of them were both rare and valuable. Almost immediately after starting to open packs from my booster box I started to realize that the game had much richer depth than the starter decks let on, despite the starter decks still being pretty darn fun to play!
Pros and Cons of the artwork
One thing I noticed right away is that the artwork on the run-of-the-mill common cards you get in your starter deck aren’t exactly anything to write home about. For the most part, they’re snapshots from the anime on a piece of cardboard. That being said, rarer cards and especially the alternate art cards have some very cool designs on them that are particularly exciting for fans of the show. Rare cards seem fairly easy to pull given my experience from my BLEACH booster, and many of them contain exclusive artworks to the game that are strongly inspired by the iconic style known from the manga.
The verdict – does UNION ARENA have a future?
The TCG space is undeniably competitive. However, it feels more open than ever before, with new TCGs making huge waves in the space. What’s more, this game has massively popular properties baked into the game, and an intriguing strategy enabling players and collectors to pick and choose their packs based on the anime they like most.
As long as this doesn’t work against them by players losing interest if too long of a stretch between anime’s they love happens, Union Arena is looking like a compelling and nostalgia fueled TCG right out the gate.
The artwork and the gameplay of UNION ARENA show strong potential and will certainly be big hits among fans like me who sort of can’t believe they get to open booster packs featuring their favorite anime swordsmen.
